What’s in the box? Kings of War Forces of Nature starter army

I recently received my Forces of Nature starter army as part of the Kings of War kickstarter. When it turned up and I started looking through it, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen much in the way of pictures of the contents anywhere so I thought I’d take some picture and do some quick blue-tac assemblies of what things looked like. The mat I’ve used it on the 1cm square side up so that’ll give you additional idea of sizes.

So this is the big bag that everything arrived in. I imagine there will be a nice box with artwork when these hit retailer’s shelves.

Hidden right at the bottom is the leader for the army – a druid. I wasn’t expecting this figure so it was a nice surprise. Here’s the components.

She comes with two different heads and arms. She’s also quite dainty and made of metal, which limited my blue-tac ability to show her off. Here’s a few shots so you can see the rough silhouette she has, how the different heads and arms look and how the cloak looks from behind. she comes on a 20mm base.

Next up is the pretty huge Greater Earth Elemental. There’s been a few pictures of this around the web and a few painted examples so this beast isn’t completely unseen – Mantic previewed the Abyssal dwarf version some time ago as well. You can see he’s a big model, made of relatively few pieces. Its made out of a type of resin I haven’t seen before. Its soft rather than brittle, but is easy to clean up and doesn’t bend or indent accidentally. Compared to the “res-tic” we’ve seen in the past, this stuff is amazing. It hates blue-tac however – I shall be sure to give it a wash before undercoating in case this is release agent or something.

It’s mounted on a 75mm square base and ape like in pose. I have seen some people pose the left arm in the air, I’m not sure which I’ll go for yet, I do like the knuckle to the ground pose if I can make it look right. Here’s a Mantic werewolf and skeleton to really hit home the scale.

Sizeways on you can see the hunch this brute has and a better shot of the crystals on his back. I really like this model now I’ve got it in my hands – he reminds me of the ABC Warrior Mongrol who is a favourite of mine!

On to some hard plastics then. Here’s the Naiads – there’s 20 in the box, so 4 lots of what you can see above. The bodies were supplied as you see above, off sprues. From what I can tell the sprue contains the following parts:

Arms to make 5 Naiads with melee weapons (tridents, spears and a katana) and nets – one may be dragging the human body you see at the bottom left

Arms to make 5 Naiads with harpoon guns and quivers

Parts to make a musician and standard bearer

Bonus frog and otter!

Plenty of spare heads for variety

I’ve blue-tac’d one torso with a couple of different options here so you can see that these fit together quite nicely and simple twists means even with the repeated parts you’ll get a lot of variety in a unit of 20 or 40 should you want it. The trident in the build above looks a little awkward so I think that would be better used on a different torso or maybe held aloft. These models are on 20mm bases.

Next is the Salamanders. There’s a lot of plastic involved in these models so I’m wondering whether the regiment box will be a little more when it’s available separately. Like the Niads the torsos didn’t arrive on a sprue and additionally a bunch of weapon arms were loose as well. Like the Niads, I have 4 times what you see here so enough to make a regiment of 20.

Here’s the sprue with the rest of the parts on.

In total I think each pair of sprues contain enough to build the following:

6 different heads. Looking at the heads and weapons it seems a few are suggested choices for leader type models

Bonus flames for basing.

Here’s a couple of blue-tac builds showing the same torso used for both main weapon options. The double handed weapon pose is much nicer than I expected. These guys are on 25mm bases.

Next up tree shamblers. All metal parts, a couple of the arms are repeated but largely unique figures. The heads and arms are interchangeable if you want variety (for a horde of 6 for example).

A quick blue-tac build, based on the Mantic web site’s promo photo for these guys. As you can see, these are on 40mm bases.

A scale shot across the models that played nicely with the blue-tac. The Elemental and Druid were not available for comment. The tree shamblers are a good size when you see them next to the were wolf and salamander, so pleased about that.

So overall there’s a lot in the box. Looking at the other Kings of War starter boxes, I think this set will retail for £49.99 when its released (April is the date I was given by my local stockist). That gives you 45 models – one of which is absolutely huge (although smaller than the Mantic Dragon I’m told!).

The sculpts on the plastics in particular are a big improvement in my eyes – other than the undead and dwarfs I’ve not really rated the Kings of War sprue based models Mantic has produced before, so this is good news at the price Mantic sell their rank and file at. I’d like to get my Naiads and Salamanders up to hordes (40 strong) and maybe look at both weapon options as well and the models are good enough to make me consider it.